RUSTY MORRISON | poem


notes from the understory (level 5) 

such that dust without my knowing 

is a subtle swirling viscosity surrounding you & me 

always or only the ‘always’ I know as this life 

dust is the cohesion & creates coherence between us 

dust of what all of us are & have been or at least 

this planet’s numinous phenomenal ‘all of us’ as such 

its consistency heightens my facility to sense 

the dead 

whom I can’t recognize without allowing for 

what will become of me


Rusty Morrison is an ARC 2020 Poetry and the Senses fellow. This poem was written while on fellowship and recently published in the Marsh Hawk Review (Spring 2020, pg 54), available here.